Posts Tagged ‘computer’

I was again on a visit to my maternal uncle’s place and that meant away from computers and internet. They have become so integral part of my life that if one day I don’t’ check my emails, it’s like missing a meal. It sounds like exaggerating but its true to a large extent. But, then I realized I had been missing other things in life because majority of time goes with the computers and television. Yes, its get kind of boring initially but for a day this change is more than welcome.

The first thing I noticed when I was traveling in bus. I was in a sleeper coach in bus and I was not able to sleep. So, I just started looking in the sky and beautiful star patterns. I don’t remember the last time I did that without thinking about other things. It was watching the stars without any thought in mind.

Next day, I was at my uncle’s home and was playing with my cousines. My 7 years old sister asked me to play ‘ghar ghar’ with her. She had the small toys to be put together as home. I know it sounds crazy and laughable, but it’s certainly worth playing after u see the happiness on her face. We never get time to play such games with kids when we have the monsters computer and television, the former one will be my means of living 😀

These are just two small instances which will illustrate the point I wanted to put forward. It reminded me of the beautiful poem of the movie Lage Raho Munnabhai. I love this poem coz it reminds us what not to miss in life, when we are vegetating in our lives. So once in a while a change is needed and can’t be expressed in a better way than this poem.

Technology has changed tremendously in last 10 years. The arrival of computers, internet, cellphones and other gadgest in our daily lives has changed our life styles to great extent. It is very exciting for people of my generation to see all these changes but it’s not easy for our parents and grandparents to handle the fast changing world. They are not comfortable with the new technologies becoming part of their lives and in fact they tend to have a Technophobia.

When cell phones prices went down few years back and they started becoming part of our lives, I could easily catch up and learn to use it. But it was not same for my parents and when I looked around this was the case with parents of most of the people of my generation. My father learnt to call and send sms soon but he was reluctant to learn other features that came along. My mother was reluctant to learn even that. She was happy asking us every time to make a call.

Same thing continued with computers too. My father picked up and learnt to use at least basic software but my mom was again reluctant to learn to use it. Whenever we asked her to use it, she would reply, ” Why should I learn?” It was just reversal from childhood and now we wanted her to learn everything and she was running away from studies. Later on I came to realize it’s just not happening in our home but was happening everywhere. I think there may be some ‘bright old parents’ who got expert quickly but for majority of old generation people using new gadgets like digital camera, music and dvd players, cellphones is still a nightmare.

But then we slowly understood their problems, became more patient while teaching them and started coming out with new ways of teaching. I remember when I had to explain her difference between hard disk and floppy disk storage capacity, I came up with analogy of difference between storage capacity of a bucket and a glass:). Sometimes these stupid things do work. She started to take interest and came with queries about different things. Another factor that forced her to learn was the introduction of computers in office work. It sound laughable that it took her so much time to learn but it was difficult for her for sure. Be it learning to control mouse or remembering which command does what.

My father was comfortable with using computers and learnt to use internet too but he was afraid of installing software thinking he might commit some mistake and computer will be dead. But after some encouragement and assurance that nothing incurable can happen to computer due to just installing software, he tried that first in front of me. Later on when I and my sis went away from home for our studies, he continued learning installations over phone and now hopefully he is no more afraid to do that.

I feel its my duty to get them familiar with new technologies and keep them up with changes happening aroud. It’s really fun to teach them new things and see the happiness on their faces when they learn something. I taught my father to use gtalk few months back and now he can use a few smileys while chatting with us. Our next job is to teach him some chat abbreviations like gn,btw,gtg,asap n so on. He can send emails, surf the web, chat with us and may be in few years would be designing his web page.

Today my mother can use basic cellphone features like calling,sending sms, saving phone numbers. She can use Microsoft Word and Excel’s features and play song on Winamp media player. She is curious to know about sending and receiving emails. May be one day she will code a C program of “Hello Word” :). After all life is all about crazy dreams and setting big goals.